Kevin's Weblog

I’ve switched from using my variant of the writeback plugin to Frank Heckler’s feedback plugin for comments. Overall, I prefer the design (it matches changes I’ve contemplated for writeback) and I like the added features like moderation, auto-closing of comments after a period of time, previewing, and Markdown support (although I haven’t enabled that yet). Readers will no doubt appreciate the fact that their paragraphs no longer get munged together. For the moment, I’m leaving moderation turned on, but I expect to turn it off shortly, once I’ve confirmed that everything is working smoothly, and that the spam concerns are well taken care of.

In the two weeks, I’ve watched 6 movies, which is fairly unheard of these days. We saw Happy Feet and Charlotte’s Web in the theater, and at home I’ve seen The Thief Lord and Cars with the little one, and Whale Rider and V for Vendetta without. A few observations:

First, I’d started to forget how much I really do like movies. For the last few years, I’ve only been able to see 3 or 4 a year. So, this has been a real treat.

Second, finding decent child-appropriate movies is much more challenging than it ought to be. As far as I can tell, Yahoo! Movies has no option to sort or filter by rating. The website for Hollywood Video does, but it was challenging to figure out how. Even then, I could only find new releases. That is how we came up with “The Thief Lord”, though, which turned out to be a good choice. Dramatic, but not too scary, no gratuitous language or violence, and not a product placement or tie-in to be seen.

Third, the rating system is just messed up. It seemed like a good thing when they started including explanations of the ratings, but really it just seems to highlight how messed up, and sometimes arbitrary it is. “Whale Rider” is rated PG-13 for “brief language and a momentary drug reference”. The drug reference is so quick and subtle most children under 13 probably wouldn’t catch it at all, and I didn’t even notice the language. On the other hand, the overall subject matter of the movie could easily be upsetting and hard to explain to a child. While browsing the video store the other night, I found an even sillier example. L’enfant is rated R, ostensibly for “brief language”. This is obvious bollocks. It’s rated R because it’s about a guy who sells his newborn son, then has to navigate the criminal underworld to get him back.

Finally, “V for Vendetta” was amazing. I expected it to be thought-provoking, but I wasn’t expecting to find myself sitting on the floor, 2 feet from the TV, completely absorbed by it. That’s not to say that I was completely supportive of V; in fact, if the story didn’t have the moral complexity that it does, I probably wouldn’t have found it as fascinating. I’ll be digesting it for a while (and I’ve got the graphic novel on hold at the library).